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Showing posts from May, 2016

My role as conductor is to provoke curiosity and joy

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Ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman has argued that "music affords power to those who search for meaning". Such is the power and appeal of the Western classical tradition that symphony orchestras now play in regions far distant from the art form's Judeo-Christian heartlands. When in North Africa recently I attended a performance of the Mozart Requiem with Olivier Holt conducting l'Orchestre Philharmonique du Maroc (Philharmonic Orchestra of Morocco). Before the concert my expectations were not high: because there is no tradition of Western classical music in Muslim Morocco, and because Essaouira where the concert was taking place evokes Jimi Hendix more than Mozart, . But despite this, conductor Olivier Holt's mastery of his Moroccan vocal and orchestral forces resulted in a Mozart Requiem of notable power and intensity . That is Olivier Holt in the header photo with Axelle Fanyo and Edwin Fardini at another concert in Essaouira. Olivier Holt will be unknow

Let's start a conversation

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In 2010 I wrote about Hamid Qabbal's novel of dissent The Spirit of a City , which is set against the background of the celebrated Gnawa Festival in Essaouira , Morocco*. Hamid Qabbal teaches English at a lycée in Essaouira, and when I returned there recently with my wife he invited us to participate in an English conversation class with his pupils - see photo above. I only wish that the malcontents who lurk on social media and post caustic comments every time Muslims are mentioned could have been there with us. Not only do we have nothing to fear from these young people, but we can also learn a lot from them. * Hammid Qabbal's latest novel The Road to Mogador fuses the two themes of political unrest in the Mahgreb and the continuing marginalisation of women in Moroccan society. Unfortunately, despite written in English - as is The Spirit of a City -  the book is very difficult to buy outside Morocco.

This is most definitely not health and safety territory

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In recent years I have followed in the footsteps of Alma Mahler on the wartime refugee route from Vichy France into Spain, descended through the Samaria Gorge in Crete, and travelled overland from Delhi to the Tibetan Buddhist heartland of Ladakh. My peregrinations continued this month with a trek in Morocco's Atlas Mountains which started in the village of Setti Fatma , seen in the photo below. Nestled in the Ourika Valley at 1500 metres, Setti Fatma is where the road into the Atlas Mountains ends, and it is a favourite bolt-hole for Moroccans escaping from the desert heat and tawdry commercialism of Marrakech on the plain below. There is scarcely space for the road and houses in the narrow valley, so the restaurant tables are set on the riverbed; in the photo below a waiter is crossing the river carrying the Moroccan national dish, the tagine. This is Berber country ; the unique music of the Berbers (Amazigh) was captured by Paul Bowles' 1959 fie

Until bloggers deliver hard facts …

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Expressions of dismay at the demise of music criticism in the paid for media leave me puzzled. Do not get me wrong, I vociferously condemn the demise of quality music journalism. But the commentators expressing dismay at the axing of music critics are all providers of free online content, which is exactly the disruptive development that has undermined professional journalism . Moreover these clickbaiting online commentators are an established part of classical music industry 2.0 and receive unqualified support - including regular juicy 'exclusives' - from the very musicians, music industry executives, and indeed readers who piously lament the termination of yet another music critic. Norman Lebrecht is not renown for getting it right . But what he wrote on 8 November 2006 in the then paid for but now free Evening Standard - see above - is still very true: 'Until bloggers deliver hard facts… paid for newspapers will continue to set the standard as the only show in

Music should be dangerous

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Silky darkness of the Maghreb night is the forge, and the Gnawa are blacksmiths turned alchemists . As the bass notes of the guembri penetrate the subconscious, they reverberate in the nervous system and induce a trance. Seven colours represent the saints in the Gnawa pantheon, and that white blur above is the cloth covering an ecstatic trancer at a Gnawa lila . White is the colour of the spirit company of Mulay Abdelkader Jilali , and during his veneration white benjoin incense burns. A Gnawa lila is a ritual of possession during which trancers, like the one above, fall into a trance and assume the identity of spirits from the pantheon. Gnawa music has become yet another commercial property , and concerts by Gnawa musicians are now commonplace. But my photos, which were grabbed discretely in impossibly low light with no flash, were not taken at a concert. Due to my work with mystical traditions - I broadcast the Gnawa spirit ritual of the Sons of the Forest in 2008 - I was

Now that's what I call World Music

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Photo was taken in the serendipitously named Bob Music in Essaouira , Morocco. Jimi Hendrix has a local connection , while Karl Munchinger's Bach is naughty but nice . Posts now become intermittent while I travel. Also on Facebook and Twitter .

Your cat is a music therapist

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A recent post told how a cat crossed my path at the Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi. Cats are cherished in Islam , and in response to my post a friend who is an adept of the Naqshbandi Sufi Order sent me a link to an article on a Sufi resource . This is about the healing power of cats, and I thought it worth sharing an edited and annotated extract with my readers. The article can be read at two levels. At one level it can be taken as an amusing mix of fuzzy science and New Age babble, as indeed can this whole and many other Overgrown Paths . But drilling down further reveals another level. The power of music to nourish and heal the human spirit and body has been conveniently forgotten in the headlong rush to turn classical music into just another tawdry entertainment . Classical music is not about snackable access , celebrity maestros , live tweeting , self-promotion , free streaming , and all those other big new idea . It is about only one thing - sound. Ancient wisdom te

There are two sides to every argument

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Yesterday the European Union Youth Orchestra announced it was to cease operations from September 2016 due to the termination of funding from the European Union. That is truly terrible news and everything possible must be done to allow that fine orchestra to continue its invaluable work. But the EUYO's case is not being helped by the classical music establishment. For example, Norman Lebrecht led with the hysterical headline that the European Union had "abolished the orchestra". Which is simply not true. The EU chose not to continue their funding; which may be a very bad decision. However the decision to cease operations was made by the orchestra itself, and the circumstances leading up to that decision deserve closer examination. Funding in roughly three equal parts from box office income, sponsorship, and public sources has been the model in other music institutions - see my article on Aldeburgh Music . Public subsidy for classical music is being reduced, and audienc

Has Edmund Rubbra's time finally come?

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Will the directive in today's government White Paper that the BBC must put "distinctive content" at its heart means less Mahler and more Rubbra at the BBC Proms ?

Banging the drum for oppressed women musicians

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Quite rightly the gender balance in classical music is being corrected. But too much emphasis is being placed on the women musicians who achieve celebrity status in an art form eviscerated by celebrity fixation , and too little attention is paid to the less fortunate women who are at last being given the opportunity to make music. While in Morocco recently I attended one of the music workshops that Ahmed Abdelhak Kaâb has been running for local women in Essaouira for five years. That is Ahmed in my photo above; he is an adept of the Derkawa Sufi Order , and as a musician has performed extensively in Europe. His workshops have a particular importance because although they are not repressed in the same way as their counterparts in the Gulf States, women still play a subordinate role in Moroccan society and suffer from low levels of literacy . Unlike more orthodox branches of Islam, Sufism has an enlightened attitude to women, and the mystic and poet Rabi'a al-'

It's OK to program something that isn't perfect

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Couldn't agree more! We need more variety in classical programming, that's for sure. And we also need to have orchestras that are willing to try new things. I think that management is often tasked with finding a huge crowd, forgetting that if you appeal to a core group of adventurous (but REGULAR) patrons, the "gamble" should pay off. However, I have to say that I have met my share of very "un"adventurous conductors - they really couldn't care less about anything new. To them, Mahler teeters on the edge. What to do with them, as they often make the programming decisions? Because like anything else, when you have a good advocate for a piece , it all falls into place, and the audience will have a fantastic time. I honestly think management gives the audience too little credit for being able to spot great music. But that gets me on another topic. Why must it necessarily be a "masterpiece" or a symphony with a proven track record? It's OK to pr

Reach is equally important in repertoire

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A reader has pointed out this YouTube trailer for the new recording of Donald Fraser's orchestration of Elgar's Piano Quintet which featured here yesterday . If we accept social media reaction as a meaningful measure of audience engagement, then this new expression of Elgar's chamber music masterpiece is engaging a lot of people. Proms founder Sir Henry Wood was a celebrated advocate of orchestrations ; which raises the question as to why Ken Woods and the English Symphony Orchestra were not invited to perform the orchestration at the 2016 Proms instead of one of the four Mahler symphonies . And if anyone accuses me of repeating myself about the predictable and uninspiring BBC Proms season, I will respond by saying that if yet another appearance by Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra , by Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Orchestra , and Rattle and the Berlin Phil is not repetition, what is? The credo of Sir William Glock, whose strong commitment to the new tr

Rarely, rarely comest thou spirit of delight!

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The Sufi teaches us that the music is the first thing that changes. When you have ordinary times you get ordinary music, and everything follows the ordinary music. When you have a creative time, that's when you have the powerful, creative music, not just here but all over the world. But when the music changes, when you get the junk and things are copied, you get an ordinary society. That parable comes from the autobiography of African American jazz pianist Randy Weston , and perusing the record company release schedules simply confirms that we live in very ordinary times. But there are notable exceptions, and one is the release this month of Donald Fraser 's orchestration of Elgar's Piano Quintet with the English Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kenneth Woods . Randy Weston tells how "when you have a creative time, that's when you have the powerful, creative music". The Piano Quintet was composed in the last year of the First World War, a terrible time that,

Mozart in Morocco

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My photos show players from L'Orchestre Philharmonique du Maroc performing al fresco in the medina at Essaouira, Morocco last weekend as part of the annual Printemps Musical Des Alizés festival. The orchestra and their choir had travelled 480km south from Rabat to give two evening concerts culminating in the Mozart Requiem. For those of us saturated in the celebrity merry-go-round of classical music in Europe expectations were not high. There is no strong tradition of Western classical music in Morocco, L'Orchestre Philharmonique du Maroc is an unknown quantity and the concert venue was the town's sports hall dressed artfully as a Bedouin tent. But the orchestra's artistic advisor and conductor Olivier Holt neatly inverted Furtwängler's maxim that there are no bad orchestras just bad conductors, to prove that there are no good orchestras, just good conductors. Olivier Holt , whose mentors include Charles Mackerras and Leonard Bernstein, is noted for his operatic

Spooky music

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We can only speculate as to why an FBI agent was perusing a post about the admirable but neglected English composer William Wordsworth . My theory is that the spook had visited the 2016 BBC Proms website and deterred by the bland fare on offer there - six Mahler programmes plus the mandatory appearances by Dudamel, Rattle and Barenboim - was investigating On An Overgrown Path for something more nourishing . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Call to prayer

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That adhan scene was captured on the rooftop terrace of our rented apartment in the medina at Essaouira, Morocco. More on this path in I thought I saw a Sufi cat .